To Selena, With Love (12 page)

Selena had been valiantly keeping up her performance schedule despite her disagreements with her father—she was a professional, and she knew that her family’s livelihood, as well as her reputation, depended on her showing up to do the gigs Abraham booked for the band. I knew that Selena was due to leave early that morning for a show in El Paso. I didn’t have anyplace to be, so I had decided to sleep in and leave at checkout time.

The pounding on the door continued; I opened my eyes and glared at the hotel alarm clock. It was just after ten o’clock. The hotel maid must be knocking on the door, I decided, thinking I’d checked out.

“No, not right now,” I yelled without getting out of bed. “Come back later. Checkout is at noon.”

The knocking continued, more insistent now. “Come back later!” I shouted again. “Don’t you see the sign on the door?”

More knocking. Grumbling, I got out of bed, yanked on my jeans and looked through the peephole.

It wasn’t the maid. It was Selena.

My first thought was that something must have happened with her father. I fumbled with the lock and got the door open. “What’s the matter? Why aren’t you in El Paso? Don’t you have a show? Did something happen?”

She was crying too hard to answer. I just held her for a while on the bed, feeling her body tremble against mine and trying to coax her to talk about whatever was going on.

Finally, Selena sat up and started telling me that she couldn’t
stand to be apart any longer. “I don’t want anybody to be in our way,” she said. “Let’s get married right now.”

Stunned, I just stared at her. “Wait a second. I love you. I want to be with you. You know I want to marry you someday. But why do we have to do it like this, right now?”

“There’s no other way,” she said, and started crying again. “We have to elope.”

I felt all twisted up inside. Half of me knew that she was right, while the other half of me was worried about what she would be giving up to do this. I wanted to marry Selena. But I also understood, from being with her when she saw a wedding scene in a movie, or a picture of a bride, how much Selena had always dreamed about her glorious wedding day. She always talked about what she would do when she planned her own wedding, every detail, right down to the invitations and the cake. If we eloped, that would never happen.

“No, no, no,” I told her. “I don’t want to get married behind everybody’s back. We can figure out a way. It’s just going to take some time for your dad to get used to the idea.”

“He never will,” she said. “You’ve seen how he is!”

I kept resisting. In the back of my mind, I was terrified that if we got married in a hurry without that fairy-tale ceremony, Selena would always regret our relationship. “You’ve always wanted a wedding,” I reminded her, smoothing her hair and pulling her closer. “I don’t want to cheat you out of that white gown and the bridesmaids and the flowers. You’ve dreamed about it all your life. You want your family there, all around you. You want your father to walk you down the aisle.”

Selena broke in, stopping me cold. “That’s never going to happen, Chris.”

And when she said that, I believed her. “All right,” I said finally. “There is nothing that would make me happier than to marry you. What do we need to do?”

“We can go to the courthouse and get married,” she said. “We can do that right now. It’s the only way he’ll ever leave us alone, Chris. Then we can be together.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it. Let’s get married.”

I couldn’t believe that those words had come out of my mouth. Married? Me? I was only twenty-two years old! But what else could I do? Selena was right. We loved each other, and there was no way that she and I were ever going to be together unless we were married. Abraham wouldn’t be able to stop us from seeing each other if we were legally husband and wife. I loved the sound of that word, “wife,” as I looked at Selena and repeated, “Come on. Let’s go get married!”

I’ll never forget Selena’s smile when I said that. I could just feel all of the pressure and stress leave her body as she watched me get dressed for the courthouse. I had nothing to wear but a T-shirt and jeans; Selena was wearing a skirt and boots.

“I couldn’t wear my best clothes,” she admitted shyly. “Otherwise my dad would have suspected something was up.”

On our second wedding anniversary, Selena and I started talking about renewing our vows after five years of marriage. We would have a real ceremony then, we promised each other. Selena bought a wedding dress and started cutting out pictures of floral arrangements she liked for our centerpieces at the reception. She even ordered a wedding registry book with a gold metal plate on it. The book had our names embossed on it, along with the date of our wedding: April 2, 1992. She had it all planned out, and it would
have been a beautiful ceremony. It almost breaks my heart to think about it now.

At the Nueces County Courthouse, Selena took control and all I had to do was go with the flow. I wasn’t scared, but I felt a little numb, as if I were in shock from making such an abrupt decision—one that would no doubt have consequences I couldn’t even predict yet. I never would have known what to do, but Selena just kept asking questions and the clerks at the windows explained what steps we needed to take. We were lucky in that the clerk agreed to waive the standard waiting period for a marriage license—probably because nearly everyone in Corpus knew who Selena was by then.

We paid what we needed to pay, signed the necessary papers, and then stood in front of the justice of the peace, who said a few words. Then, bam, we were married, just like that. It was crazy. I couldn’t believe that I was actually in this room with Selena, saying wedding vows.

Those moments went by so fast, yet I knew that the way I felt about her at that very moment was going to be the way I felt about her forever. No matter what I had thought about marriage before—not much, truthfully, given my own family history—I felt with great certainty that remembering those marriage vows would always be a sort of glue holding us together.

Neither of us cared that it was just the two of us standing in front of the justice of the peace or that we were so young. Everything else—even thoughts of the wedding Selena was giving up and worries about her father and the band—flew right out the window.

We were in love. We were husband and wife. We were happy. Nobody could come between us anymore. That’s all that mattered.

The best part of the day was walking hand in hand out of the courthouse, our shoulders touching, instead of having to pull apart when we were in public. It all felt so good, even as I wondered what Abraham would do when he heard the news. Selena and I were at peace with our decision, content to know that we had finally, officially started our lives together. We had every intention of living happily ever after. Nobody could stop us from doing that now.

After the wedding, we drove straight from the courthouse in Corpus to my dad’s apartment in San Antonio so that I could collect my things. San Antonio suddenly seemed safer to us since Abraham was in Corpus and we certainly weren’t ready to face Selena’s family with our news. Beyond that, we didn’t really have a plan.

As we drove, Selena and I talked about what Abraham might do, and what would happen if he ended the band. “He’s not going to do that,” Selena said. “He’ll come around.”

Whatever we did next, from whether we lived in Corpus or San Antonio, to how we would make a living, hinged on Abraham’s reaction to our wedding. We knew that we couldn’t really make any decisions about anything until we talked to him.

Every now and then, Selena and I would be derailed from this logical conversation by the knowledge that we’d done it—we’d really gotten married! It was almost like having an out-of-body experience, the way we could see ourselves in the car from the outside, not quite believing that we were looking at a young couple madly, deeply in love and now—in a very weird way—on their
honeymoon. We had just done something major, an act that would change our lives forever, and we were still kind of in shock because we didn’t know how people would handle it.

“We’re married?” one of us would ask.

“We’re married!” the other would cry out, and then we’d both laugh until the tears were running down our faces.

At the same time, I tried not to imagine what Abraham and A.B. might be saying or doing right then. I was certain they’d had to cancel their gig in El Paso when Selena didn’t show up, and I knew they must both be worried sick, not knowing where she was, or if she was hurt or injured. They might assume the worst; after all, Selena never spaced out or blew off a gig. She was never anything less than professional—until today. But running off to marry me was Selena’s way of putting her foot down and saying “enough is enough” to her father. She was just two weeks away from her twenty-first birthday, and she was ready to assert her independence as a woman.

Selena and I kept worrying aloud about what we would do if Abraham demolished Los Dinos, but I didn’t really believe that would happen. Abraham surely wouldn’t throw away everything that they had worked so hard to create. I didn’t know what part I’d have to play in the band, if any, but that was fine by me. I could just keep doing what I was doing, making music in San Antonio and earning my own money. I had stood up to Abraham before and I was prepared to do it again.

My father had met Selena a few times, but usually only at shows. When she came to visit me in San Antonio, we did sometimes go to the apartment, but usually during the day while my dad was at work. He liked her, though. I knew that much. Selena had that quality about her that made you feel like you’d known her forever; within
minutes of seeing her, she’d joke around and make you laugh, drawing you into a conversation and making you feel comfortable. Still, growing up with Abraham, Selena had learned that fathers could be a formidable force in a family. She was extremely nervous about telling my dad our news and so was I.

When we walked into the apartment, my dad said, “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Nothing much,” I said, and went straight to my room to start packing, trying to think of a way to tell him. Selena, meanwhile, must have stayed in the living room; by the time I was in my room with my dad behind me, she was nowhere in sight.

That’s weird
, I thought, until I realized that Selena was really nervous. Even knowing her as well as I did, it always amazed me whenever Selena exhibited anxiety, because onstage she was almost another person: confident, emotional, personable, sexy, even swaggering. She always worried that people might not show up to hear her sing. Sometimes she’d peek out at the audience from backstage and, if there was a good crowd, she’d get giddy when she saw how many people were out there, no matter how popular she became. But, once Selena was in the spotlight, she gave her performances every ounce of her spirit and energy.

I started pulling clothes out of my dresser and stuffing them into a duffel bag. My father stood in the room, frowning as he watched. “
Mi hijo
, what happened?” he asked.

My father had seen me make more than one mistake—usually with cars or alcohol. He had even come to the rescue a few times. By the look on his face, I could tell that now he was really worried that I’d made another one. I said, “Nothing, Dad. Everything’s fine.” I swallowed hard. “But we did it.”

“You did what?”

I couldn’t even say the word “married.” It wasn’t a word that was going to just roll off my tongue. How do you go from being in a secret relationship to announcing to the world that you’re married?

“We did IT,” I said again.

“I still don’t understand,” my father said.

“Selena and I got married,” I managed.

“What?” I had a chair in my room that I used to sit in to practice guitar. Now Dad sat down really slowly on that chair and shook his head.

I could tell that, for him, this wasn’t bad news, exactly, but it wasn’t good news, either. “Damn,” he said.

My father, always ready for a conversation, was nearly speechless. As I stood there watching him, I realized why: After being in a marriage that didn’t work out, after struggling to create relationships with kids he never lived with, my father knew that marrying young, or marrying at any age, wasn’t always going to end up the way you thought it might.